“My hope is that we get to the end of the first quarter, and everybody looks at their cash flow and says, ‘It doesn’t matter. I can’t hang on anymore. I’ve got to make some decisions,’ ” Farris said from his office here April 9.

Apache
is still on the hunt for assets from cashed-starved companies, but on Wednesday, 200 of Farris’ employees shared some of that pain, as the independent oil and natural gas company laid off about 6% of its 3,600-person workforce.

“When you are not as active, you don’t need as many people,” said company spokesman Bill Mintz.
ConocoPhillips
and oilfield services companies
Baker Hughes
,
Halliburton
and
Schlumberger
have also made recent layoffs.

Cash flow for the $22 billion market-cap company has fallen 40% since oil hit its July peak of $147 and cascaded down. Oil traded Wednesday around $49 a barrel, natural gas around $3.50 per thousand cubic feet.

Apache declined to comment on what parts of its business are being cut. “It’s 6%. It’s not a large percentage of the workforce, and we’ve just decided to speak in general terms,” Mintz said.

The North American drilling rig count has been cut in half in the past year. Apache, which operates in Australia, Egypt, Argentina, the North Sea and North America, has dropped its rig count in Oklahoma from 25 to 1, and from 11 to 2 in the Gulf of Mexico. “When you are drilling fewer wells you need fewer people,” Mintz said.

During the April 9 interview, Farris reflected on past downturns and seemed wary about recent layoff announcements in the oilfield services industry:

“All the major service guys are cutting heads,” he said, adding that major layoffs in the industry “would be a shame because in the end we are going to need them. We had a big fallout in the ’80s, and it cost this industry lots of very technically sound people that never came back. We just now got to the point that people really wanted to be back in this industry. All of a sudden, we are going through it again. So it’s not a good way for things to work, but it works that way.”